Free What He Promises by Hannah Ford

hell were you
thinking?”
    “What the hell was I thinking about what?”
    “About getting letters from Colin Worthington
and not telling me?”
    My stomach flipped like a pancake onto a hot
griddle, sizzling with anxiety.   “That’s what I came here to tell you.”
    “How long?” he demanded.
    I swallowed and averted my eyes from his.   “The first one came two weeks ago.”
    “Two weeks ago?” he raged.   “Jesus, Charlotte, you have no idea what
kind of position you are putting yourself in.”
    “Yes, I do,” I said.   “That’s why I came here.   I wanted to tell you.”
    “Why?”
    “Why what?”
    “Why did you want to tell me?”
    “So you could help me!”
    “Help you what, Charlotte?”
    “Help me to stop them,” I said, but even as I
was saying the words, I wasn’t sure they were true.  
    “You could have stopped them yourself,” Noah
said, a vein in his forehead throbbing.   “You didn’t need me for that.   You could have called the warden, you could have called the jail and
told them you didn’t want to receive letters from him anymore.   And yet you didn’t.   Why didn’t you do that, Charlotte?”
    The room was starting to swim, and I took a seat
in the chair Clementine had just vacated.   “I don’t know,” I said.
    “You don’t know?”
    He was right, of course.
    I could have stopped the letters. It would have
taken two seconds to make a call to the jail.   They would have put me on Professor
Worthington’s do not contact list.   No prison was going to let an inmate have unwanted contact with one of
his victims.   So then why hadn’t I
done it?
    “Noah,” I said slowly, trying to form my
jumbled thoughts into a coherent sentence.   “Do you think it’s weird that I haven’t been back to school?”
    “What?” he asked, seemingly thrown by the
change in topic.   “No, I don’t think it’s weird, Charlotte.   You have been through an extreme trauma.”
    “But two weeks.”   I shook my head.   “I’m slipping behind.   It might be impossible to catch up.”
    “I’ll call them,” he said.   “I’ll talk to them.”
    My hands tightened around the arms of the chair
I was sitting in.   “No,” I
said.   “No, I don’t want you to call
them.   I don’t want you to make a call
and fix everything, Noah.”
    “Then what do you want, Charlotte?”
    “I want you to talk to me!”
    “I am talking to you!”
    “No, I want to be able to talk to you about
what happened at Force.”   I twisted
my hands in my lap. “There was a girl there, Noah.   She needed my help.   I can’t just forget about her.”
    “This again,” Noah said, shaking his head.   “Charlotte, you told the police about
her.   You did everything you
could.   She is not your
responsibility.”
    “Yes,” I said.   “She is.   She needed help and – ”
    “Stop saying that!”   He crossed the room to where I was and sat
down in the chair across from me, pulled me forward so that we were facing each
other.   He grabbed me around the
waist and slid me down the chair toward him until our legs were touching.
    He leaned forward and took my face in his
hands.   “She is not your
responsibility.   But you are my
responsibility.   I won’t let
anything happen to you, Charlotte.   I will protect you this time, no matter what the cost.   If that means you getting angry with me
because I am going to stop you from doing certain things, well, then, so be it.”
    “This time?” I asked.  
    He looked away, but I could see the pain on his
face.
    “Is that what you think?” I pressed.   “That you didn’t protect me?”   I shook my head.   “You did protect me, Noah.   If it weren’t for you, I would be dead.
But I need to be able to talk about things, I need to
be able to process them.   I need to
be able to figure out exactly what it was that happened.”
    “I’m doing the god damn best I can!”
    “Well, I need more,” I said, the words